Physician from UMass in line for Bronze Star

Wednesday

Jul 3, 2013 at 6:00 AMJul 3, 2013 at 8:13 PM

Like most Americans, Dr. Mark D. Price has heard the national anthem on the Fourth of July. “This year will be different for me,” said Dr. Price, an orthopedic surgeon at UMass Memorial Medical Center. He recently returned from a nine-month tour in Afghanistan as a member of the U.S. Navy Reserve. On Father's Day he learned that he will receive the Bronze Star on July 14 in Newport, R.I.

By Linda Bock TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF

Like most Americans, Dr. Mark D. Price has heard the national anthem on the Fourth of July.

“This year will be different for me,” said Dr. Price, an orthopedic surgeon in the Sports Medicine Division of orthopedics at UMass Memorial Medical Center. He recently returned from a nine-month tour in Afghanistan as a member of the U.S. Navy Reserve and said others in the military have told him that his first Fourth of July back after serving overseas would be very different.

“They told me I'd be reduced to a blubbering mess,” he said.

After almost 20 years of wrestling with the desire to join the military, preferably the Navy, to serve his country, Dr. Price, 40, finally fulfilled his dream with his wife's support and joined the Navy Reserve. The couple has three young children. Dr. Price worked with a multinational team of doctors that essentially followed the Green Berets around, built a mobile hospital and performed surgery as needed — sometimes under fire.

On Father's Day he learned that he will receive the Bronze Star on July 14 in Newport, R.I., an honor he said belongs to his whole team. The Bronze Star will be awarded to him for meritorious service in combat situations and for his innovation in outfitting the mobile hospital unit.

“I always wanted to join the Navy,” Dr. Price said. “I always had it in my mind. Maybe I saw 'Top Gun' one too many times.”

He strongly considered attending the Naval Academy for his undergraduate education, but his father gently talked him out of it. Even so, Dr. Price briefly considered attending medical school on a Navy scholarship, but did not. Instead he attended Harvard Medical School and married 17 years ago. He remembered he was in the middle of a residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and, as luck would have it, one day there was a Navy recruiter speaking at a lunch-time conference.

“My third child had just been born,” Dr. Price said. It was six years ago, and Dr. Price said the recruiter told him that the Reserve might be for him. “I very timidly took the sheet of paper he gave me (to take) home to my wife. She's known me for so long and she's a complete superwoman,” he said.

“She was incredibly supportive,” said Dr. Price, a team doctor for the Boston Red Sox. He was with the team in Florida in the spring of 2012.

So Dr. Price joined the Naval reserves. Ironically, he said, joining the Navy Reserve was somewhat anti-climatic at first. “It wasn't exactly what I had in mind.” He was assigned to do health checkups and other routine doctoring in the beginning of his service. Dr. Price even contemplated getting out.

However, the Navy had other plans for him, and Dr. Price is grateful it did.

“I got a phone call,” Dr. Price said. “Not only was I not getting out, but I was going to Afghanistan.”

He learned he would be away from home for roughly nine months, with seven months overseas.

“This was a teary moment for both of us,” Dr. Price said when he told his wife and the reality sunk in. The couple had about six months to prepare before he left for training at the end of August 2012. By fall, he was in Kunduz in northern Afghanistan heading up a nine-man team of doctors.

There were three components to their mission: Treating injured coalition soldiers and performing life-saving surgeries on the injured, performing humanitarian surgeries for the Afghans such as correcting pediatric deformities. The final component of the mission was to work the mobile surgical unit.

“We partnered with the Green Berets' Special Forces,” Dr. Price said. His team worked to properly outfit the mobile unit with supplies and equipment from hospitals that were closing or about to close as the Americans wind down their presence in Afghanistan.

Dr. Price said their military convoy was attacked at the end of December, and as he was running out to get supplies to treat one of the injured, he was shot at.

“I could see the red of their muzzles... They were about 200 yards away opening up on the whole convoy,” Dr. Price said.

“It's a good thing the Green Berets were there. Our guys are much better shots.”

Dr. Price was asked how he felt about joining the military in his mid-30s.

“Three of us doctors, we all sort of had that 'holy smokes, what did we just do feeling?' ” Dr. Price said. He said he came away from his war experiences feeling even more patriotic and more convinced he made the right decision.

“I live in a world where no one does military service,” Dr. Price said, not disparaging a typical doctor's life, but instead, commending the people who have the military's mentality of giving up something for their country. “I think serving in the military should be at the top of people's lists.”

Dr. Price said he has so many memories, but one surgery will stand out for him. An Afghan father brought him his 11-month-old son who was born with two extra thumbs and an extra pinkie finger, and surgery was able to correct his hands.

“The father said to me that 'my son's too young to understand, but I will make sure he understands what the Americans did for him.' ”

One of the interesting things about his service was the excellent communications, everything from being able to participate in a parent-teacher conference via Skype, but also being able to get instantaneous feedback on medical dilemmas from doctors at UMass and MGH.

“I used the 'phone-a-friend' options not infrequently,” Dr. Price said. He also praised UMass and everyone at the Sports Medicine Division for being 100 percent supportive.

“I'm certainly not the first to go. Tony Lapinsky (Dr. Anthony Lapinsky) is a spine surgeon in the Army. He's been to Afghanistan and Kuwait. He basically blazed a trail for guys like me. UMass has a great tradition of doctors serving in the Reserves.”

In addition to fulfilling his lifelong dream of serving, Dr. Price said, the experience made him a better surgeon because of having to perform surgeries under challenging battlefield conditions.

Dr. Price said he and his family will celebrate the Fourth of July in Vermont, where, he joked, he will be able to blubber in the privacy of his family.